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Amex Offers bonanza!

UPDATE (8/26/2017): I've made 19,000 points from these Amex Offers and I'll get 3000 more from these promos next month!

The Chase Sapphire Reserve's overwhelming popularity has got Amex shaking in their boots. From the looks of things, they're spending a bunch of marketing money by coming up with Amex Offers to bribe people into using their Amex cards for purchases that are likely not in the Sapphire's bonus categories (dining and travel).

The big wildcard with Amex Offers is that they're somewhat random – there are different offers for different customers, and they're different on every card if you have more than one type of Amex. After looking over my offers, here's how I'm getting in on the action:

5000 bonus miles for spending $5000

I have lots of spending that doesn't neatly fall into any card's bonus category, so I'm stuck earning one lowly point per dollar on it. With this offer, I can essentially double it, provided I hit the spending target. I've charged a few big expenses from my business to my personal Amex (which was my only card with this offer) and then filed an expense report for myself. I've already gotten a confirmation email from Amex that I've reached the threshold once, and I'm going to try to hit it a second time.

1000 bonus points for spending $100 on cellular bills

I have the T-Mobile ONE plan right now, but it's set to auto-pay $70 a month. I went in and manually made a payment of $101 and it went through no problem. Click Pay Now, then manually enter an amount, and click to confirm that you're overpaying your bill. I got an email confirmation from Amex that the offer bonus happened a few minutes later.

Luckily this offer showed up on the same card as the previous one, so my payment here will also help me hit that $5000.

Near-instant confirmation

1000 points for paying your cable bill

Here's another offer that will stack with the first one and is also in a category where I'd otherwise only earn one point per dollar. I was really hoping that this offer would be on another of my or my husband's cards so we could double-dip (our cable/internet bill is $210 a month) by each making a half-payment on the bill, but alas he didn't get this offer. Again, I got an email confirmation from Amex that I'd earned the bonus minutes after the charge went through.

Home Depot one extra bonus point per dollar

I need a new shower head and Home Depot stocks the one I need (our fixtures have weird color and it needs to match) so I added this Amex Offer to my card before I bought. This spending also counts toward the $5000 in the first offer, plus I'm earning 2 points per dollar on top of that. Like a bad "As seen on TV" commercial, "But wait, there's more!" – if I use the United Mileage Shopping portal to visit Home Depot's website, I'll earn another point per dollar, plus it'll count toward their Back To School bonus program

Using the United Mileage Shopping portal, I'm going to nab another 500 points on this showerhead

Kinda "manufacturing" some spending paying my ConEd electric bill

Our local utility here in NYC has a website that seems like it hasn't been updated since about 2003, but it does let you pay your energy bill online via credit card for a flat $3.35 fee regardless of the size of the payment. Assuming each mile is worth 2¢, that means this fee is "worth it" for any amount over $167. I'd read on Reddit's churning forums that you can charge up to $1500 on the ConEd website and the remainder simply applies to next month's bill. This could come in handy if you go abroad for longer trips because their website isn't accessible outside the United States. I charged $1200 and this should help me reach that second 5000 point bonus. (Also, there's some penny-wise logic in paying that $3.35 fee as few times as possible).

Martha Stewart Wine

Both my and my husband's cards got this offer for $40 off a $50 order. Most of wine offers on the various points programs want you to join some kind of club so I never bother. This one didn't. We did one order on my card, used a Coravin to sample all three and then used my husband's offer to buy 3 bottles of the one we liked most (the Ocean Breeze Pinot Noir).

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